Red Sparrow

Red Sparrow is an old fashioned spy thriller. It stars Jennifer Lawrence and Joel Edgerton. Lawrence is a famous dancer who sustains an injury and is offered to work as a spy in order to save her mother who needs a surgery. This film reunites Jennifer Lawrence with her Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence. The end result is a movie that is sometimes engaging and sometimes dull.

While parts of Red Sparrow are incredibly entertaining, it manages to be completely lifeless half of the time. The performances are fantastic as Lawrence is great as she usually is, and Joel Edgerton also lives up to his reputation. Jeremy Irons is also great, but with limited screen time. I can commend Red Sparrow for not worrying about being cinematic as nothing is really played up for the big screen. The novel that the movie is based on is written by an ex-CIA agent. This feels like a more realistic spy thriller, than most films you see today that are undoubtedly written to be pure entertainment value. That said if you’re seeing this movie to be purely entertained, it might lose you in some parts.

I think that my biggest issue with Red Sparrow is how convoluted the narrative gets. It starts out being easy enough to follow, but somewhere in the middle there is way too much going on, and it just lost me. It seems like it just got way ahead of itself and didn’t take time to slow down and at least give some clues to its audience about what is going on.

Red Sparrow is well directed, well acted and has some fantastic cinematography, but ultimately suffers from a needlessly long run-time and convoluted plot. This isn’t a “can’t miss” movie, but if you have nothing else to do giving Red Sparrow a chance probably wouldn’t be the worst thing you could do.